#sff 2021

[teachablr-moment]

Reading Dune right now and I was thrown off that there weren't more Melville-esque natural history rambles.

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[olderthannetfic]

Idk if it's just me but it seems like fandoms in general are just a lot slower than they used to be, as in people don't post as much fanart or fanfic as they used to and people in general interact with fan content (so, less likes, reblogs, replies, comments, etc.) no matter what site you're using. Even discord feels oddly dead, to the point where I've had to leave some servers because there was absolutely no activity anymore. I'm curious if anyone else has noticed this recently or whether it's just my own specific experience.

--

It's your own specific experience.

It's also a sign that we're in a transition phase rather than one where people are easy to find and centralized.

People used to make a billion unneeded mailing lists for every hot new show or blorbo. Now, they make discords. The vast majority die in a week.

But if you were to get into whatever the latest hotness is and post some excellent art or a fic with the right tropes at the right time, you'd see tons of activity.

I've seen your type of complaint as long as I've been in fandom, and it's a very natural part of one's own experience as one stops being into the hip thing or loses track of old acquaintances as one's social groups scatter to different platforms. In terms of lived reality, it's a huge pattern...

But, just to choose an easy example, if I go to AO3 and pick a big tag, then filter it for May 2025, I see tons of updates. Here's the sidebar for the m/m tag filtered that way:

Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling (4291)

僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga) (2325)

Original Work (2090)

9-1-1 (TV) (1739)

Stray Kids (Band) (1513)

原神 | Genshin Impact (Video Game) (1443)

방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS (1434)

Arcane: League of Legends (Cartoon 2021) (1339)

Formula 1 RPF (1310)

崩坏：星穹铁道 | Honkai: Star Rail (Video Game) (1264)

87,659 total works have been updated May 1st-17th 2025. Sorting by comments, I see plenty with thousands.

Now, I do see people who were once into your classic due South, Stargate, etc. who didn't jump on the Untamed train and still haven't been dragged over to Asian fandoms, don't like video games, don't read RPF, etc.

There can for sure be changes in what type of thing is seeing the most action, especially within one's own platforms or friend groups. The f/f shippers complain "I don't like cartoons". The m/m shippers wonder "Where's the next big sff or buddy cop live action English language show?"

It's possible to be starving in the midst of plenty. But no, fandom overall is not slowing down.

[solradguy]

i agree w/ ur takes on unika 100% but as someone who's been invested in guilty gear for a while what are your thoughts on strive's story compared to xrd's? i like strive's less than xrd's but i think i fucked it up for myself by reading background info from the wiki & watching strive first

Strive was what hooked me on Guilty Gear and I feel the story had juuuust enough deep stuff to interest me but not so much that it came across like SFF wordsalad haha It got me interested in the characters and made me curious to learn more about Gears and the Backyard specifically in a way that I think Xrd would have been too overwhelming with. I went into Strive knowing basically nothing other than that Sol Badguy is where the fighting game term "install" came from lol (ok I knew the GGXX soundtrack too)

That said, I watched Xrd's story right after and I liked Xrd's a lot more. More happened, the characters were better fleshed out, and I liked the overall plot. I also liked that it involved more of the cast. But Strive was developed during peak covid-19 years (~2018-2021) and I think that REALLY messed up a lot of what they wanted to do with it. It makes me wonder what the story would have been like if they worked on Strive in conditions closer to when they were doing Xrd.

If I had been into Guilty Gear before Strive I don't think I would have been very happy with it and I can definitely see where oldheads come from when they complain about it, but a lot of people are too mean about it tbh. At worst Strive can be just kind of lukewarm, imo. ASW's goal with it was to make a game that was a good jumping on point for new fans to both GG and to fighting games and it does that really, incredibly, well. I didn't care about fighting games in a serious way at all until Strive and now I do tournaments and sometimes even place decently in them ahaha

So, in short: I like Xrd more than Strive in all ways but Strive isn't that bad and I owe a lot to it

[mousegirlheart]

I have a question about your computer! Do you know what parts of it are broke? Or is the whole thing just completely wasted? OwO

i have no idea honestly. it COULD be the power supply. i try to turn it on and the rgb fans light up and spin for a second and then it immediately turns off. the power supply and motherboard are from an elitedesk 800 g1 SFF, i7 4790 cpu, gtx 1650 gpu, 32gb ddr3 ram, 1tb sata ssd. i built it in i think 2021 and it worked great for a long time. broke after i moved from Melbourne to north queensland. continued working for a bit and then kaput. i would LOVE to get it working again and save having to replace it entirely.

[ofliterarynature]

TBR TAKEDOWN: GOODREADS, WEEK 24b

Archivist Wasp (Archivist Wasp Saga #1) by Nicole Kornher-Stace

I'm trying to trim down my tbr list(s) and I'm asking for your help! Descriptions and more info under the cut. Please reblog and add your thoughts!

* * * *

Wasp's job is simple. Hunt ghosts. And every year she has to fight to remain Archivist. Desperate and alone, she strikes a bargain with the ghost of a supersoldier. She will go with him on his underworld hunt for the long-long ghost of his partner and in exchange she will find out more about his pre-apocalyptic world than any Archivist before her. And there is much to know. After all, Archivists are marked from birth to do the holy work of a goddess. They're chosen. They're special. Or so they've been told for four hundred years.

Archivist Wasp fears she is not the chosen one, that she won't survive the trip to the underworld, that the brutal life she has escaped might be better than where she is going. There is only one way to find out.

Date added: 2021

Goodreads: 3.74

Storygraph: 3.78

PRO:

Ghosts! Archivist? Hmm.

From reviews, it seems to move a bit more slowly (which is probably good for YA sff)

I think this is often recommended as no-romance/ace-adjacent?

Both books in the series are available from the library in my preferred format (audiobook)

CON:

YA

post-apocalyptic

[axvoter]

Blatantly Partisan Party Review XIX (federal 2025): Shooters, Fishers, and Farmers

Running where: for the Senate, VIC and TAS; for the House, 7 seats in NSW plus Lyons in TAS

Prior reviews: federal 2013, VIC 2014, federal 2016, VIC 2018, NSW 2019, federal 2019, federal 2022, VIC 2022, NSW 2023, WA 2025

What I said before: “Exactly what it says on the tin. The SFF will water down our successful gun control laws, support environmentally destructive policies, back the mining and logging industries, and be a brake on urgently-needed climate action.” (VIC 2018)

What I think this year: The Shooters are primarily an NSW party: they were founded there in 1992 and it is where they concentrated most of their energies in the 1990s and 2000s. They did field some interstate candidates at federal elections, but it was only in the 2010s that they began contesting state elections elsewhere. Since their first NSW state election in 1995, the Shooters have won one seat in the NSW Legislative Council at every election except 1999, and they seemed to be on an upwards trajectory in 2019 when they won three lower-house state seats too. But that soon imploded: one of those three quit, party leader Rob Borsak made offensive comments about her, and when he would not apologise, the other two also walked out.

The Shooters have never been able to turn their success in NSW state politics into success at the federal level, and when they have picked up seats in a couple of other state parliaments it has been thanks to preference harvesting through Group Ticket Voting (a system abolished for Senate voting in 2016, so that voters today have full control over their preferences at federal elections). They have held 1–2 seats in Victoria since 2014, and had one in WA from 2013 to 2021; this was briefly two in 2016–17 after a Liberal defected. The Shooters' statewide tally at a couple of those elections in Victoria and WA would be good to win a seat legitimately under the at-large proportional system used in NSW and introduced this year in WA. Those specific Victorian and WA elections, however, had multi-member regional divisions with higher quotas to win a seat, and the party would almost certainly not have won seats had above-the-line voters been free to allocate their own preferences.

I say all this partly because I enjoy writing electoral history in these reviews, but mainly because I find it a bit bizarre where the Shooters are running candidates this year. Although they are standing in seven (mostly regional) seats in NSW for the House of Representatives, they have not submitted a ticket for the Senate despite this state being their home turf and where they would have the best chance—if a very improbable one—of scoring a seat via a good regional campaign. It’s unlikely they will even make the two-candidate-preferred count in any of the seats they are contesting, let alone win. They contested just two of them in 2022 and got 5.31% in Farrer and 6.37% in Riverina. Meanwhile, they are running Senate tickets in Victoria and Tasmania. I’m surprised not to see the Shooters stand in WA given their history in this state, but after the hiding they got at the state election, not even faintly competitive despite the small quota required to win a seat on the Legislative Council, perhaps their campaigning energies are at a low ebb.

The party’s policies are what you would expect: reckless attitudes about gun ownership, rants that fishers are victims of “green government and bureaucracy gone mad”, and a lot of anti-environmentalist/anti-Greens rhetoric. Like just about every right-wing minor party since 2020, they talk about covid and healthcare with language about “freedom” in the hopes it will secure votes from cookers and conspiracists. And I find it fascinating how pro-mining they are. This is not the party for farmers who are anxious about the effects of resource extraction on their farms and the watercourses on which they depend, despite some lip service to the idea that mining “must never be allowed to permanently affect prime agricultural land or water systems”.

The Shooters’ climate policy is contrarian drivel that sows doubt about established scientific facts by repeating worn-out talking points on natural climatic change and hand-waving about the inevitable side effects of having a human population of seven billion. They insist that any policy on climate change should “not unnecessarily restrict the activities of farmers, resources, transport, manufacturing or any other industry”. Basically, even if there is evidence of serious human-induced climate change that they are willing to accept, they want to play no part in responding to it. It’s the climate policy for Homer Simpsons everywhere asking “can’t someone else do it?”

Finally, I wish the gun-toting right would stop uploading their policies as PDFs (yes this includes you, Katter’s Australian Party) and just put their policies on a normal webpage.

Recommendation: Give the Shooters, Fishers, and Farmers Party a low preference in the House and a weak or no preference in the Senate.

Website: https://www.shootersfishersandfarmers.org.au/

[bloody-wonder]

2024 reading wrap up

january is almost over and yet the ghost of reading year past shall not rest untill i rank all the books👻📚

*the tiers are once again named after different things from the books featured on this list - see explanation below🙃 **the following series i read in full are represented only by one book respectively: doctrine of labyrinths, her instruments, the riverside trilogy, the memoirs of lady trent, the cemeteries of amalo, the stolen heir, the summer hikaru died, evander mills, page & sommers ***usually i don't rank rereads but since this year i had only two - the three musketeers and swordspoint - and they both ended up on the top tier i decided to add them for completeness' sake

so in 2024 i broke all my previous records in regards to the amount of books/pages read. my secret? being unemployed lol. but now that i have started my phd and got a full time job my reading is bound to decrease dramatically which is probably a good thing bc i feel like, while reading so much definitely helps you find more good books and authors faster, the downside is that stories stand out less, regardless of their quality. altho i do love every book i put on the top tier dearly, compared to the previous year's (smaller) selection this one seems quite homogeneous and sff focused. and 3 out of top 5 books/series are straight! who is responsible for this?!🤨

i did well on almost all my nerd ass challenges: finishing and continuing series, starting new ones, not neglecting standalone sff, reading widely in terms of genre and language, not putting off big intimidating books etc etc. i even completed my oldest challenge for the first time by finally managing to read five chunky classics in the span of one year - this won't be happening again any time soon😅 in the future i want to shift my focus to difficult historical novels instead bc i sure don't have enough brain space for both. where i "failed" on the other hand was reading nonfiction: i realized that no matter how much interest i have in the topic the only way i'm able to process factual information is if a trans youtuber dressed as a dominatrix or a cat or some sort of jester is telling it to me in an asmr voice. i'm not very good at encouraging myself to reread the things i want to reread either - hopefully that will change in 2025 so that i can finally reread aftg🪄

last year i tried blogging more about my current reads and it was fun while it lasted - now i sadly don't have time to do that anymore :( so my 2024 reading updates must remain unfinished. in any case, just by looking at this tier list i can come to the same conclusions i would've come to if i had reviewed each and every one of these books: niche sff is where it's at for me, older books are better written, and simply queer is not enough for me anymore - i need intricate mind games and rituals that transcend sexuality lol.

so if you know such books please rec them to me! and tell me about your reading year - by making a tier list, or writing a post or just sharing your fave 2024 reads like @oliviermiraarmstrongs tagged me to do. thank you btw😌💜

@figuringthengsout @fugitoidkry @pinkasrenzo @fandomreferencepending @counterwiddershins @magpiefngrl @sugarbabywenkexing @weirdsociology @theodoradove @doh-rae-me @venndaai @sixappleseeds

p.s. it just came to my knowledge that my year in books is still active. tagging everyone who wants to do this! :D

goodreads │ old yearly wrap ups 2020 2021 2022 2023 │ my book tag

✨explanation of the tier titles under the cut✨

obligation d'âme is a spell a wizard can cast on a person in sarah monette's doctrine of labyrinths that binds them "closer than lovers". it's very bdsm-coded and a tiny bit problematic bc the enchanted then has to do everything the wizard commands and they may or may not be referred to as slave🫢🙈 on the bright side tho it's very hot and gay🤷‍♀️ just like obligation d'âme these books have put me under their problematic spell🪄

peltedverse is the unofficial name of mca hogarth's sci fi universe populated by humans, human-animal hybrids, space elves and aliens, which has been steadily growing on me ever since i discovered the dreamhealers. in 2024 her instruments completely charmed me by its cast of loveable characters, wacky adventures and fairy-tale romance. it's not the best thought-out world but it has this home-cooked quality to it which i prefer to carefully calculated lore that makes 100% of sense all the time. and these books, while not as good as the ones in the upper tier, have still captured my heart😌

racallio ryndoon is an episodic character in george r.r. martin's fire & blood. he's a chaotic crossdressing bisexual pirate captain with purple hair who likes to be spanked by his wives, gives severed heads as a courting gift and will sell the right of safe passage through his waters for a kiss. all in all, a perfect character who is sadly present only for one short episode. i remember him fondly but i wish he had more to give - just like these books☠️🦜⛵

calliagnosia is a procedure ted chiang invented in his short story liking what you see: a documentary which enables people to turn off their perception of physical beauty - leading to less lookism-based discrimination at the cost of finding nobody hot lol (at least in their looks). the story follows the controversy around making calliagnosia obligatory in certain environments and just like the characters who can't seem to decide whether finding people hot or stopping discrimination is more important, i am of two minds on whether these books are actually good or not😅

gong bath is the preferred method of patient treatment of the sex therapist the main character of jen beagin's big swiss is working for. meaning: the patient rests on the couch while the therapist chants and strikes the gong he has in his office. just like gong bath, these books didn't harm me - but they didn't cure me either😐

the philosophers' colloquium is the crusty dusty male centered science academy that kept refusing to admit lady trent despite her outstanding contributions to the natural history of dragons😠 disappointing, overrated, ill-shampooed - just like these books🧐

life-sickness is something the inhabitants of hope mirrlees' lud-in-the-mist didn't realize they suffered from until they tried forbidden fairy fruit. these books were so disappointing, boring, annoying or offensive that they made me brain-sick, depressed and upset about the state of Literature😩

[nowtoboldlygo]

twenty books in spanish, tbr

for when i'm fluent!! most with translations in english.

Sistema Nervoso, Lina Meruane (2021) - Latin American literature professor from Chile, contemporary litfic

Ansibles, perfiladores y otras máquinas de ingenio, Andrea Chapela (2020) - short story collection from a Mexican scifi author, likened to Black Mirror

Nuestra parte de noche, Mariana Enríquez (2019) - very long literary horror novel by incredibly famous Argentine journalist 

Canto yo y la montaña baila, Irene Solà (2019) - translated into Spanish from Castilian by Concha Cardeñoso, contemporary litfic

Las malas, Camila Sosa Villada (2019) - very well rated memoir/autofiction from a trans Argentine author

Humo, Gabriela Alemán (2017) - short litfic set in Paraguay, by Ecuadoran author

La dimensión desconocida, Nona Fernández (2016) - really anything by this Chilean actress/writer; this one is a Pinochet-era historical fiction & v short

Distancia de rescate, Samanta Schweblin (2014) - super short litfic by an Argentinian author based in Germany, loved Fever Dream in English

La ridícula idea de no volver a verte, Rosa Montero (2013) - nonfiction; Spanish author discusses scientist Maria Skłodowska-Curie and through Curie, her own life

Lágrimas en la lluvia, Rosa Montero (2011) - sff trilogy by a Spanish journalist

Los peligros de fumar en la cama, Mariana Enríquez (2009) - short story collection, author noted above

Delirio, Laura Restrepo (2004) - most popular book (maybe) by an award-winning Colombian author; literary fiction

Todos los amores, Carmen Boullosa (1998) - poetry! very popular Mexican author, really open to anything on the backlist this is just inexpensive used online

Olvidado rey Gudú, Ana María Matute (1997) - cult classic, medieval fantasy-ish, award-winning Spanish author

Como agua para chocolate, Laura Esquivel (1989) - v famous novel by v famous Mexican author

Ekomo, María Nsué Angüe (1985) - super short litfic about woman's family, post-colonial Equatoguinean novel; out of print

La casa de los espíritus, Isabelle Allende (1982) - or really anything by her, Chilean author known for magical realism; read in English & didn't particularly love but would be willing to give it another try

Nada, Carmen Laforet (1945) - Spanish author who wrote after the Spanish civil war, v famous novel

Los pazos de Ulloa, Emilia Pardo Bazán (1886) - book one in a family drama literary fiction duology by a famous Galician author, pretty dense compared to the above

La Respuesta, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1691) -  i actually have a bilingual poetry collection from our favorite 17th century feminist Mexican nun; this is an essay defending the right of women to be engaged in intellectual work (& it includes some poems)

bookmarked websites:

Separata Árabe, linked by Arablit

reading challenge Un viaje por la literatura en español

[ashmouthbooks]

EARTH IS MISSING! / EVERYONE'S WORLD IS ENDING ALL THE TIME

this spring I entered the Elizabeth Soutar Bookbinding Competition held by the National Library of Scotland. The theme this year was climate change. I didn't win any of the categories (I certainly didn't think I'd win any of the Craft categories, but I thought I had a decent shot at the Creative categories) but I am very happy with how my binding came out anyway!

under the cut is the details of the binding and the process that went into it, plus a full list of the texts included.

this is a modified 3 piece bradel binding - a 3 piece bradel is usually made with leather spine with the spine attached to the textblock and the front and back covers added on after. there's another variety of a 3 piece bradel case where the spine and boards are assembled with a thin piece of paper to later be covered with a bookcloth. I wanted to use some leftover misprint cardstock I had (the same stuff I'd previously used to make paperbacks) and I wanted to print the titles directly onto the covers and spine (specifically I wanted to overprint the titles to imitate the existing misprint), and in order to fit it through my printer I had to have it in three pieces. so I assembled a bradel case as if it were to be covered with a cloth, only the cardstock I was using to assemble the case would also be the cover material.

everything I used to make this book was recycled or reused, with the exception of the greybeards which were new (I didn't have any rescued book boards from secondhand books at the time). the text paper is recycled eco-craft paper, the endbands are re-used macramé cords wrapped in green wrapping paper that came from a gift bag, and as mentioned, the cover material comes from a misprinted running sheet.

a few process photos of getting the case together:

in terms of content, I took care that not only should the binding fit the theme of climate change - by using recycled and reused materials - but the text inside should also fit the theme. there were a lot of considerations there because I could easily have just bought a copy of something like Greta Thunberg's speeches and rebound them, but I wanted the texts to be something that made sense to me. so I went and looked at the SFF magazines I read for climate fiction and essays, I looked for academic papers, and I looked on Gutenberg for older pulp fiction relating to climate change. once I had a selection of texts I pared them down to two categories, fiction and non-fiction, and decided the most fun way to bind them would be as a tête-bêche with fiction on one side and non-fiction on the other, and this then informed how the binding would physically turn out - the modified 3 piece bradel.

here is the full table of contents for each side of the book:

EVERYONE'S WORLD IS ENDING ALL THE TIME and other writings

A Climate of Competition: Climate Change as Political Economy in Speculative Fiction, 1889–1915 by Steve Asselin Published in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, SF and the Climate Crisis (November 2018), pp. 440-453

A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment by Sherryl Vint Published in the MIT Press Reader, 20th July 2021

The climate is changing. Science fiction is too. by Eliza Levinson Published in The Story, 30th June 2022

’Not to escape the world but to join it’: responding to climate change with imagination not fantasy by Andrew Davison Published in Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol. 375, No. 2095, Theme issue: Material demand reduction (13 June 2017), pp. 1-13

Science in Fiction: A Brief Look at Communicating Climate Change through the Novel by Eline D. Tabak Published in RCC Perspectives, No. 4, COMMUNICATING THE CLIMATE: From Knowing Change to Changing Knowledge (2019), pp. 97-104

Everyone’s World Is Ending All the Time: notes on becoming a climate resilience planner at the edge of the anthropocene by Arkady Martine Published in Uncanny Magazine issue 28, May 7, 2019

EARTH IS MISSING! and other stories

Earth Is Missing! by Carl Selwyn in Planet Stories (1947)

Climate—Disordered by Carter Sprague in Startling Stories (1948)

Climate—Incorporated by Wesley Long in Thrilling Wonder Stories (1948)

A Being Together Amongst Strangers by Arkady Martine in Uncanny Magazine (2020)

You’re Not The Only One by Octavia Cade in Clarkesworld Magazine (2022)

Why We Bury Our Dead At Sea by Tehnuka in Reckoning Magazine (2023)

[labjegyzet]

Az év magyar science fiction és fantasynovellái 2024 antológia - novellapályázat

Az év magyar science fiction és fantasynovellái antológiasorozat 2018-ban indult, abból a tapasztalatból kiindulva, hogy a fantasztikus kispróza népszerűsége az olvasók körében is megnőtt, és hogy nincs egészséges és írói fejlődésre teret adó fantasztikus irodalmi élet gazdag és több platformon zajló novellakiadás nélkül. Ehhez a GABO az antológiasorozatával maga is hozzájárult: a kezdetek óta nagyjából száz novella jelent meg köteteiben ismert és új szerzőktől.

Kiadványaink a Márai-program segítségével határon túli könyvtárakba is eljutottak, valamint a megújult Zsoldos Péter-díj jelöltjei és nyertesei  között számos 2019-ben, 2020-ban, 2021-ben és 2022-ben antológiáinkban megjelent novella megtalálható. A 2023-as Zsoldos-díj eredményhirdetése a minap zajlott: novella kategóriában Gaura Ágnes Az erdő szíve című írása nyert, amely antológiasorozatunk legfrissebb kötetében jelent meg, regény kategóriában pedig Rusvai Mónika Kígyók országa című művét díjazták, amely szintén a GABO Kiadó gondozásában került boltokba. Emellett a szintén novellásköteteinkből ismerős Puska Veronika Vétett út című regénye is nálunk talált otthonra.

A GABO SFF idei novellapályázatára is fantasy, science fiction, horror és weird novellákat várunk. Arra kérünk azonban minden pályázót, hogy a sokszínűség érdekében igyekezzenek minél szabadabban nyúlni az egyes zsánerekhez, ne ragaszkodjanak az esetleg már bevált megoldásokhoz, használják ki a lehetőséget, hogy a fantasztikum szinte határtalan játékteret biztosít.

A kiadó szerkesztői által legjobbnak ítélt művek 2024 őszén fognak megjelenni.

A pályamunkákat az info@gabo.hu címre kérjük. Kollégánk, aki nem vesz részt az értékelésben, nyilvántartást vezet a pályázók adatairól, és a novellákat anonimizálva küldi tovább az elbírálást végző szerkesztőknek. Eredményhirdetés 2024 augusztusában várható. Amennyiben a pályázat elbírálásakor a szerkesztők nem találnak elég novellát, hogy megtöltsenek egy kötetet, utólag pályázaton kívül íródott műveket is beleválogatnak az antológiába.

Ami pedig a kritériumainkat illeti, azok évek óta változatlanok, ezért idézünk a 2018-as pályázat utáni blogbejegyzésünkből:

„Mi nem divatnovellákat keresünk, nem kell igazodni trendekhez, nem érdekel minket a jól ismert régi. Olyan fantasztikus novellákat szeretnénk látni, amelyeket nem tudna más megírni, csak az adott szerző, az ő saját, egyéni látásmódjával és érzékenységével, amelyek épp emiatt újak és különlegesek.”

Határidő: 2024. június 17. éjfél

Terjedelmi korlát: 10 000 - 40 000 leütés

Honorárium: megjelenés esetén bruttó 40 000 Ft

Megjelenés: 2024 ősz

Formai követelmények: A novellákat RTF vagy DOC formátumban várjuk, a fájl neve tartalmazza a szerző nevét és a novella címét. A fájlban szintén fel kell tüntetni a szerző nevét és elérhetőségét. A szöveg legyen sorkizárt, a sortávolság szimpla vagy másfeles, kiemelésre bold vagy kurzív használható, hacsak a novella nem tartalmaz rendhagyó formai megoldásokat.

Beküldés: elektronikusan az info@gabo.hu címre, az e-mail tárgymezőjébe kerüljön bele a “pályázat” szó, pl. Tárgy: PÁLYÁZAT: Gipsz Jakab: Novella címe. A kísérőlevélben a könnyebb adminisztráció érdekében szerepeljen a pályázó neve, emailcíme és a novella címe.

Tematikai megkötés: science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird

Kikötések: Magyar nyelven sem nyomtatott, sem online formában nem publikált, eredeti, fennálló franchise-hoz nem köthető műveket várunk, amelyekkel máshol sem találkozhattunk korábban (tehát nem kaptuk meg korábban kéziratként, pályázaton kívül). Egy szerző egy pályaművet küldhet be.

Friss, eredeti, tartalmas novellákat várunk. Ugyan bármilyen témát szívesen látunk a fantasztikum területén belül, van néhány történettípus és -elem, amelyiknél már nehéz újat mondani. Javasoljuk, hogy a pályázók olvassák el a 2018-as kiírás tartalmi megkötéseit, és a novellapályázat tanulságait 2018-ban valamint 2019-ben.

További támpontok, milyen novellákat keresünk:

Az év magyar science fiction és fantasynovellái 2018

Az év magyar science fiction és fantasynovellái 2019

Az év magyar science fiction és fantasynovellái 2020

Az év magyar science fiction és fantasynovellái 2021

Az év magyar science fiction és fantasynovellái 2022

Az év magyar science fiction és fantasynovellái 2023

és

Az év legjobb science fiction és fantasynovellái 2016

Az év legjobb science fiction és fantasynovellái 2017

Az év legjobb science fiction és fantasynovellái 2018

Az év legjobb science fiction és fantasynovellái 2019

Az év legjobb science fiction novellái 2020

Kleinheincz Csilla és Roboz Gábor

szerkesztők

[equilateralromance]

i'm vee and i've had this blog since 2021 :) here's my stuff and things!!

i'm the creator of until the end of time - a billford zine, which was published in august 2024. it was not only the first billford zine to feature solely triangle bill, but the first released during the billford renaissance after the book of bill came out. i was deeply honoured to work with everyone on it. in the spirit of fanzines throughout history, i wanted it to be accessible to as many people as would want to read it, so it's a digital zine that's free to download forever.

download it here

publication post here

other than the zine, i'm most well known for portal trio au. in 2021 it was a case of me creating what i wanted to see, which was bill/fidds/ford as an ot3. nowadays i think this ship is tagged 'billfiddlesford' or similar, but when i first started creating for it, i was, to my knowledge, the only person doing so beyond a throwaway gag. my ongoing longfic, so far from summer, tells the story of the trio reuniting several years after canon. my oneshot, the ol' three-legged waltz also takes place within this au and recounts the first time bill and ford formed ciphord in the 80s.

so far from summer on ao3

the ol' three-legged waltz on ao3

portal trio tag

sffs tag

finally, my art tag is equilateral art and on any of my art posts you'll see they're also tagged by year. my other aus include a better world severance au (fiddauthor) and excelsia au (billford), for which more is coming soon!

thank you for reading!! ∆

[accidentalspaceexplorer]

6, 13, 22?

End of year book asks:

6. Any new favorite authors?

I absolutely loved Lev A. C. Rosen's Evander Mills books, and I'm so excited to see what he continues to write! Also, while she isn't new to me, necessarily, I do think I've bumped Seanan McGuire up to a favorite author this year with how obsessed I got with the October Daye books.

13. How would you summarize your reading choices for this year?

Honestly probably "scattered" lol. One of my priorities was to read down the number of series I had, so I tried to focus on picking up the next book in a series, and that worked occasionally - I really went ham on the October Daye books & I'm caught up with those now, & I DNF'd or completed 7 series that I hadn't read a book in since 2021 - but I also mood read a lot, picking up new series and binging them in a way I haven't since I was in like middle school, or picking up something totally random and reading it when I had all sorts of other books that were more conscious priorities. So my reading was all over the map this year.

22. What are some books you discovered this year that you added to your TBR?

I've added probably 300 books to my TBR this year, so I'll give you a couple of the backlist ones I've added recently that I'm really excited about: Crocodile on the Sands by Elizabeth Peters (a mystery writer from the 1970s I'd never heard of before), Ammonite by Nicola Griffith (I knew about Hild but I didn't realize she'd been writing queer SFF for decades), and Scarlet Odyssey by C. T. Rwizi (an African fantasy that came out in 2020 I somehow had never heard of before!).

Thanks for asking! :)

[rhetoricandlogic]

One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars

(This review was originally posted on Goodreads in 2021):

“We were the time warriors, and we killed time.”

Somewhere, no – somewhen, at the edge of Time (or whatever is left of it after the time-shredding Causality War) is a peaceful idyllic farm where the last survivor of the time war spends his days tending the crops, restoring old Soviet tractors, feeding his pet allosaurus — and murdering any remaining time travelers that come to his “when”, a bottleneck in Time. This is the only way he sees to prevent yet another Time War.

“They all end up here, because this is the end-time. This is all the time there is. This is the trailing edge of what comes later, after the breach in regular transmissions left by the war. A bottleneck, you understand. You want to fling yourself forwards past the badlands of the war, this is where you end up. And I’ll be waiting for you. Nobody gets by me. I have literally all the technology in the world, culled from every moment that anyone ever had a Big Idea, to make sure of exactly that. I am the ultimate surveillance state.”

Except for – of fragging course! – things will not go the way they are supposed to. Many many times. Because threats don’t only come from the shattered past. There will be tractors and dinosaurs and murders and statues and unpleasant visitors and even polite tea time, and bonding over mutual misanthropy and assassination attempts, and it all will be funny and twisted and darkly humorous.

“By setting up shop here where the regular passage of time recommences, and denying access to the future to all comers, I am saving the unseen future from interference. I am time’s gatekeeper, and without me the future would become the same ruin as the past.”

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a guy I’d love to hang out with and pick his brain and share a drink or two with. He’s obviously brilliant and wonderfully funny and can pull the rug out from under you with a few sentences that you need to reread a few times just to understand how throughly he just messed with your expectations. All while having a blast with the sardonic and misanthropic and yet objectively funny story that comes from dark places and leads to those even darker — but chuckling along the way. Oh, and you betcha there’s going to be a grandfather paradox — but presented Tchaikovsky-style, with a fresh irreverent take on it and a healthy dose of sarcasm.

“How I love the rugged outdoors life! Living out here with nothing but the fields and the animals and literally the best technological support that anyone ever invented.”

I start to think that there’s nothing in SFF that Tchaikovsky cannot do. He is yet to disappoint me. His books have all been solid for me, and if he doesn’t eventually become one of SFF acknowledged classics, I will be quite baffled.

And if you don’t feel a shiver of dread at hearing the word “twee” after finishing this book, then you, my friend, will need to give that last page or two another read.

[mayarab]

BEHOLD THE BEANS!

These are Aliyah (they/them) in the back, Horace (e/em) in the middle and Rumi (he/him) and they are the ace main characters from The Chronicles of Nerezia!

The first one, Awakenings, is already funded on Kickstarter, but you can still help!!!

Blurb and Description

As the city’s eternal apprentice, Horace has never found a clan to belong to. E has joined Trenaze's guards with hopes to finally earn eir place during eir trial day at the Great Market—that is, until the glowing shards haunting the world break through the city's protective dome. Armed with a sword and too little training, Horace doubts in eir ability to defend the market-goers. But eir last stand is interrupted by a mysterious elven figure who can dissipate the shards with a single, strange sentence: your story is my story. 

From the moment it is uttered, Horace knows the sentences holds true for em, too—and when the elf collapses in the middle of the market, e carries them to safety. After an afternoon of board games in their quiet, sharp-witted company, Horace is ready to follow this elf as they seek the forest that haunts their dreams, and answers to the confounding events at the Market. Their story is eir story, and e is willing to confront the dangers of the road to hear their laugh again and finally feel like e belongs.

The Chronicles of Nerezia is a series of nine queer fantasy novellas with non-binary aroace MCs that marries the quiet moments of cozy fantasy and the sweeping twists of epic fantasy. It’s currently running on Kickstarter!

—

Author Bio

Claudie Arseneault is an easily-enthused aromantic and asexual writer with a never-ending cycle of obsessions but an enduring love for all things cephalopod and fantasy (together or not!). She writes stories that centre platonic relationships and loves large casts and single-city settings, the most notable of which are the City of Spires series (2017-2023) and Baker Thief (2018).

In addition to her own fiction, Claudie has co-edited Common Bonds (2021), an anthology of aromantic speculative short stories. She is a founding member of The Kraken Collective, an alliance of self-publishing SFF authors, and the creator of the Aromantic and Asexual Characters Database.

[axvoter]

Blatantly Partisan Party Review III (WA 2025): The Nationals WA

Prior reviews: none, I have never previously reviewed the Nationals

Normally, I do not review the Nationals because I do not review any members of the federal Coalition parties (Liberal, National, Queensland’s LNP, or NT’s Country Liberals). If you are reading this blog, you have almost certainly got views on these parties already and don’t need me to review them. I have made an exception for this WA state election, though, because there is something worth saying here.

The Nationals (formerly known as the Country Party) have a tumultuous history at state level in WA, both in terms of whether they work in coalition with the Liberals and in terms of their own splits. They have at times been the larger of the two parties when in opposition, but they have never been the larger of the two when in government; Country missed out by one seat in 1947, and had they been the larger party then they would have supplied the premier. At the 2021 election, the Nationals won more seats in the lower house than the Liberals, four vs two, so for the first time since 1947 they have been the official opposition. Heading into this election, the numbers are 3 apiece because Merome Beard defected to the Liberals in October 2023 (she won her seat at a byelection a year previously after the sitting National member resigned—that member, Vince Catania, had also been a defector, in his case from Labor to National).

The Nats have decided to take advantage of the WA Liberal Party being in a historically weak position by nominating candidates for metropolitan seats, something they have not done for a century. They normally only stand in regional seats, but this time they are competing against the Liberals in Perth, and not just in seats on the suburban fringe where you might anticipate the strongest metropolitan sympathies for the Nationals might lie, but also in Liberal heartland seats like Bateman and South Perth, which Labor won for the first time in 2021 and will likely relinquish this year.

Will it work? Look, I’m doubtful the Nats can win anything in Perth, but it's going to be fun to see how this plays out. I don’t have a Nat contesting my own seat—a pity, as I would’ve enjoyed duelling Nat and Lib leaflets landing in my letterbox—but some candidates might have a chance if they campaign well among the community and get their name out there. Some seats might be genuine three-cornered contests.

Anyway, policies! Obviously I am not a big fan of the Nats. Let’s take a few examples why. They oppose Labor’s strict new firearms laws, which they think are motivated “more by ideology than practicality”—well that’s fine by me because my ideology is very much “gun ownership should be regulated tightly”. Funnily enough the Nats say they “remain the sole political party opposing Labor’s draconian legislation”, which will be news to the Shooters, Fishers, and Farmers Party, who are even more frothing mad about this. The Nats would like to restore the “Royalties for Regions” slush fund that they twisted Colin Barnett’s arm into introducing early in the term of the Lib/Nat coalition state government of 2008–17; this was obvious pork-barrelling even by the Nats’ usual standards. They also want to continue live exports of sheep, in service of which they have a very lazy pun encouraging their supporters to “tell Labor to flock off”. As I noted in my SFF review, that ban is at federal level so the state parliament can’t do shit. Roger Cook has been doing his best to distance state Labor from the federal policy, but it seems the state party will still cop backlash for it in regional seats.

There is, though, one National Party policy that I support: they would completely deregulate trading hours in Perth. At the moment, most businesses are restricted to trading between 8am–9pm on weekdays, 8am–5pm on Saturday, and a completely bonkers 11am–5pm on Sunday. I grew up in country New Zealand during the nineties, at a time when many shops closed at 1pm Saturday and did not open on Sundays (the laws enforcing this were repealed in the 1980s but my rural hometown took a while to change its practices). When I moved to Perth in 2022, I felt like I was stepping back in time. We live in a secular society; keeping shops closed on Sunday morning makes no sense. The Nats make the reasonable argument that restricted trading hours now favours online traders by putting a barrier in the way of local businesses. (The Libs, by comparison, would allow Sunday trading to begin at 9am but that's all they propose modifying.)

Recommendation: Give the National Party of WA a weak or no preference in the Legislative Council. If you have National and Liberal candidates competing for your Legislative Assembly seat, consider carefully the order in which you rank them—this might be a judgement call based on what you can glean about the personality and abilities of your local candidates. If one wins, which person is more palatable? That will vary between seats.

Website: https://www.nationalswa.com/

[olderthannetfic]

Everyone I know who found TIHYLTTW mildly disappointing and overhyped (including me) read it shortly after it came out and won all those awards. I'm not sure where people got the idea that everyone is suddenly discovering it thanks to that Trigun fan's tweet going viral (which was neat in itself). Anyway, the mixed opinions of this book among core SFF readers starting in 2019 are part of an ongoing conversation about what gets praised in the Hugo-winning mainstream (non-Puppy, non-dudebro space), which is often cliquey, risk-averse, and arguably compromised in terms of the core ethics/values of progressive SFF. For instance, the Hugo Awards got a ton of backlash in 2021 for being sponsored by the American defense giant Raytheon. This was the same year that you had winners like the fifth instalment of Murderbot Diaries, which has been recced on your blog as good ace rep (I only half-agree as it falls into the robot-as-ace stereotype, but that's beside the point; for a certain kind of reader, "good rep" is the only real litmus test of a book's quality and so they praise it even when it's iffy). Basically you have a situation where an org devoted to progressive, inclusive SFF takes blood money while feeling minority-allied and conflict-free. And while none of this implicates TIHYLTTW directly or any other Hugo-winning book from any adjacent year, I can't help but feel like the excessive (imo) praise of certain books exists against the background of larger decoupling of personal ethics/politics and inclusive rep in fiction. And what inclusive queer rep looks like in a space where you're discouraged from taking risks and getting nasty is shallow characterization, bloodless insta-love, and stylish prose that keeps you at arm's length.

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